"I know. You know what Christabel says. 'Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.' I feel we've done away with that too-And desire, that we look into so carefully-I think all thelooking-into has some very odd effects on the desire."
"I think that, too."
"Sometimes I feel," said Roland carefully, "that the best state is to be without desire. When I really look at myself-"
"If you have a self-"
"At my life, at the way it is-what I really want is to-to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked.
Some of that is to do with-my personal circumstances. But some of it's general. I think."
"I know what you mean. No, that's a feeble thing to say. It's a much more powerful coincidence than that. That's what I think about, when I'm alone. How good it would be to have nothing. How good it would be to desire nothing. And the same image. An empty bed in an empty room. White."
"White."
"Exactly the same."
"How strange."
"Maybe we're symptomatic of whole flocks of exhausted scholars and theorists. Or maybe it's just us."
"How funny-how very funny-that we should have come here, for this purpose, and sit here, and discover-that-about each other."
They walked back in companionable silence, listening to birds and the movement of weather in trees and water. Over dinner that night they combed Melusina for more Yorkshire words. Roland said, "There's a place on the map called the Boggle Hole. It's a nice word-I wondered-perhaps we could take a day off from them, get out of their story, go and look at something for ourselves. There's no Boggle Hole in Cropper or the Ash Letters- Just not to be caught up in anything?"
"Why not? The weather's improving. It's hot.”
“It wouldn't matter. I just want to look at something, with interest, and without layers of meaning. Something new."
Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone's primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.
They took a simple picnic. Fresh brown bread, white Wensleydale cheese, crimson radishes, yellow butter, scarlet tomatoes, round bright green Granny Smiths and a bottle of mineral water. They took no books.
The Boggle Hole is a cove tucked beneath cliffs, where a beck runs down across sand to the sea, from an old mill which is now a youth hostel. They walked down through flowering lanes. The high hedges were thick with dog-roses, mostly a clear pink, sometimes white, with yellow-gold centres dusty with yellow pollen. These roses were intricately and thickly entwined with rampant wild honeysuckle, trailing and weaving creamy flowers among the pink and gold. Neither of them had ever seen or smelled such extravagance of wildflowers in so small a space. The warm air brought the smell of the flowers in great gusts and lingering intense canopies. Both had expected one or two flowers at most, late modern survivors of thickets seen by Shakespeare or painted by Morris. But here was abundance, here was growth, here were banks of gleaming scented life.
There is not exactly a beach, under the cliff. There is a stretch of sand and then shelf after shelf of wet stone and ledges of rock-pools, stretching away to the sea. These ledges are brilliantly coloured: pink stone, silvery sand under water, violent green mossy weed, heavy clumps of rosy-fingered weeds among banks of olive and yellow bladderwrack. The cliffs themselves are grey and flaking. Roland and Maud noticed that the flat stones at their bases were threaded and etched with fossil plumes and tubes. There was a notice: "Please do not damage the cliffs; respect our heritage and preserve it for all of us." Ammonites and belemnites were on sale in Whitby. A young man with a hammer and a sack was nevertheless busy chipping away at the rock-face, from which coiled and rimmed circular forms protruded everywhere. A peculiarity of that beach is the proliferation of large rounded stones that lie about like the aftermath of a bombardment, cosmic or gigantic. These stones are not uniform in colour or size; they can be shiny black, sulphurous yellow, a kind of old potato blend of greenish waxy, sandy, white or shot with a kind of rosy quartz. Maud and Roland walked along with their heads down, saying to each other, "Look at this, look at this, look at this," distinguishing stones for a moment, with their attention, then letting these fall back into the mass-pattern, or random distribution, as new ones replaced them.
When they stopped and spread their picnic on a rock, they were able to look out, to take a large view. Roland took off his shoes; his feet were white on the sands like things come up out of blind dark. Maud sat on the rock in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Her arms were white and gold; white skin, glinting hairs. She poured Perrier water from its green flask, declaring its pure origin, Eau de Source; its bubbles winked in cardboard cups. The tide was out; the sea was far away. The moment had come for a personal conversation. Both felt this; both were mostly willing, but inhibited.
"Will you be sorry to go back?" Maud.
"Will you?"
"This is very good bread." Then, "I have the impression both of us will be sorry.”
“We shall have to decide what-if anything-to tell Blackadder and Cropper.”
“And Leonora. Who will be arriving. I am apprehensive about Leonora. She carries one away in the force of her enthusiasm."
Roland could not quite imagine Leonora. He knew somehow that she was large and now imagined her suddenly like some classical goddess in draperies, pulling the fastidious Maud along by the hand. Two women, running. Leonora's writings made him imagine more than that. Two women…
He looked at separate Maud, in her jeans and white shirt under the sun. She still wore a scarf-not the silk turret now, but a crisp cotton one, green and white squares, tied under her hair in the nape of her neck.
"You will have to decide what to say to her."
"Oh, I have decided. Nothing. Until at least you and I have reached some-end-or decision. It won't be easy. She is-she is-invasive. An expert in intimacy. She reduces my space. I'm not very good with that sort of thing. As we were saying. In a way."
"Perhaps Sir George will make a move."
"Perhaps."
"I don't know what will happen to me when I get back. I've got no real job, as you know-only bits of sufferance teaching and the piecework on the edition. I depend on Blackadder. Who writes dull references about me, making me sound even duller. I can't tell him all this, either. But it's going to make it harder to just go on. And then there's Val."
Maud was looking not at him but at an apple, which she was dividing into paper-thin wafers with a sharp knife, each with its half-moon of bright green rind, its paper-white crisp flesh, its shining dark seeds.
"I don't know about Val."
"I've never talked about her. Better not. I feel I shouldn't. I've lived with her since I went to university. She's the breadwinner. I suppose I'm here partly on her money. She doesn't like her work- temping and things-but she does it. I owe her so much."